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Why Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Won’t Lead to Action on Climate Change

Hurricane Irma devastated the Caribbean and parts of Florida. ThIs photograph was taken on the island of Barbuda, which was especially hard hit by the storm: for the first time in 300 years, no one is living on the island.
Image Credit: Pan American Health Organization

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It’s not easy to hold the nation’s attention for long, but three solid weeks of record-smashing hurricanes directly affecting multiple states and at least 20 million people will do it.

Clustered disasters hold our attention in ways that singular events cannot — they open our minds to the possibility that these aren’t just accidents or natural phenomena to be painfully endured. As such, they can provoke debates over the larger “disaster lessons” we should be learning. And I would argue the combination of Harvey and Irma has triggered such a moment.

The damages caused by the storms will undoubtedly lead to important lessons in disaster preparation and response. For many, though, the most urgent call for learning has been to acknowledge at long last the connection between climate change and severe weather.

Will this cluster of disasters provide the lever that will move climate change in the United States from a “debate” to an action plan?

It’s easy to view disaster history in this cause-effect way — to hop in time from disaster to disaster and spot the reforms as though they naturally emerge from adversity and commitment to change. But as a historian with a focus on risk and disasters, I can say this view can be misleading.

Generational reform

Early in the 20th century, the United States went through an era of profound concern over urban disasters that seemed to threaten city life itself.

In December 1903, the Iroquois Theatre Fire in Chicago killed over 600 audience members due to faulty construction. Just over a month later, in February 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire consumed 140 acres of the city. That same month, a major fire ravaged Rochester. In June of the same year over 1,000 people died due to a fire aboard the General Slocum steamship in New York City.

Newspapers of the era were full of anger and fear over the dangers of fire and the unscrupulous actions of greedy builders and shipping line operators. Despite the intensity of this 1903-04 disaster cluster, Americans would see many more such disasters (San Francisco 1906, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 1911) before consequential reforms in fire safety were passed into law.

Eventually those reforms did arrive, but not all at once, and not with one bill. The reforms were distributed in building codes, city plans, and product safety standards that came into place by the 1930s. The disasters defined moments in time; reform was generational.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001, provides another telling example. The disaster led to multiple investigations and studies, including the best-selling 9/11 Commission Report. Perhaps the most lasting effect of September 11 was the restructuring of government that created the Department of Homeland Security.

However, we should be careful when we leap quickly from disaster to reform. The federal response to 9/11 appeared swift and decisive but was in fact following a script set in place over the previous decade through repeated attempts by some policymakers to reshape the government’s capacity to respond to the terrorism threat.

It took years for scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology to finally explain the exact causes for the collapse of the Twin Towers. And in doing so, they uncovered fire, structural, and evacuation vulnerabilities in the towers. These flaws were first witnessed in the 1993 bombing but dated back to the 1960s when the buildings were designed and built. The September 11 reforms did come, but only as part of a broad continuum of concern, research, and debate over policy choices that had long preceded that terrible day.

Slow-moving disasters versus events

This brings us back to Harvey, Irma, and the climate change connection. We have not seen any storm-day conversions on climate change in the Trump administration — indeed, EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt remarked that it was “insensitive” to even broach the topic while the storms were still active.

There is plenty of evidence in social psychology to indicate that individual perceptions of risk — or individual commitments to an ideology — cannot be easily shaken by external factors, even factors as dramatic as storms like Harvey, Irma, or even Katrina.

This fits the historical pattern: Clustered disasters might sharpen our senses to the risks in our midst and even disturb our complacency, but they will not necessarily lead directly to new legislation or personal ideological shifts. Strong commitments to land use, profits, and real estate development have historically militated against calls for caution, restraint, and mitigation, even though these types of laws make Americans safer from disasters. This dynamic will not be altered by two hurricanes, no matter how terrifying their effects.

Better indicators of change, drawing from history, have proven to be events that cluster over much larger stretches of time. A “slow disaster” frame allows civil society and scientific researchers to build a case for change that is strengthened by disaster events. For example, the red alert about the toxicity of DDT raised by Rachel Carson in 1962 had immediate effects, but that was only one early step in a series of events that followed. It should be seen as part of a much more impactful and slower process of reform that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and a wave of environmental regulations that took effect in that decade.

This relationship between discrete disaster events and slow disaster eras is a critical one for us to understand. We might just now be at the very beginning of such an era in the public consciousness over the connections between disasters such as hurricanes, fires, and droughts, and the slow disaster of climate change.

Taking the long view

It’s frustrating for people who want quick government action on climate change to be told they should play a “slow disaster” game. And why shouldn’t they be angered if they have experienced the loss of a loved one or a home in the disasters of these past weeks? Still, it’s useful for us to see that even the most devastating disasters are probably points on a longer timeline — one that might lead to reform if and when broad-based political action prepares the way.

Indeed, disaster victims making common cause with scientists and engineers has been one proven way to bring about a type of learning from disaster that might be more effective towards achieving ambitious changes. These could include the United States re-entering the global community on climate action and the passage of laws that would require climate change planning to affect future construction.

But the hurricanes of Harvey and Irma will be a catalyst for a new age of realism regarding the hazards of climate change only once civil society and our politicians recognize them as part of a pattern that stretches over decades, not weeks. Our urgency to learn from disaster is important, and it is a moral imperative. We would be wise to harness this urgency to form a generational commitment to reducing the suffering from disasters.

Scott Gabriel Knowles is a professor of history at Drexel University. This post originally appeared at The Conversation.

2 Comments

Opening the Overton Window wider
The climate change issue is a little different from the Chicago fire, etc, since the climate change issue is already been within the Overton Window (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window ) for the public at large for some time, even if it's still taboo within the narrower culture of the current administration, and a (dwindling) slice of the US congress. The hurricane season is a good opening for discussion, even though much of that discussion may primarily be happening behind closed doors in the majority party, fearing primary election pushback from the fossil fuel lobby.

Quick action on climate change isn't likely to be forthcoming at the federal level, but that's not the same as NO action. Regional & local action won't be stopped in it's tracks, and is indeed accelerating. The extent of the current hurricane season is serving as a prod to those who are already actively working the problem.

"We have not seen any storm-day conversions on climate change in the Trump administration — indeed, EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt remarked that it was “insensitive” to even broach the topic while the storms were still active."

No Scott, it's not insensitive to broach the topic while the storms are still active.

However it IS insensitive to broach the topic of the cost & funding of disaster relief in Puerto Rico weeks/months before there is even sufficient operational grid infrastructure or potable water to properly assess the extent of the damage or death toll, both of which are still in progress. The fatalities from this disaster aren't all discovered yet (indeed not all are even dead yet!) The longer damaged buildings remain uncovered or not properly shored up, the more damage will be incurred. This emergency is still quite active and evolving and will be for some time, just as it did for months in Haiti after the earthquake.

The words may be different but the melody lingers on
Whenever I read stuff like this written by learned professors, I'm reminded of Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich's best selling 1968 book, "The Population Bomb."

It began, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over" and went downhill from there. We're still here, Paul. More of us and fatter than ever.